Maybe I was wrong about this being part of an episode. Maybe her reaction to the destruction of the Great Synagogue was because she was a Jew and I was not, or maybe because she was stoned, or else because she was seventeen and understanding the full cruelty of human history for the first time. But God, she had never looked more like Katya than at that moment.
“Your mother would get upset like this when she was your age,” I told her. “Only for her it was about American slavery.”
Vera looked up. “She did?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I remember she had a breakdown in the middle of American history class. They were watching Roots and she had to leave the room and go throw up in the bathroom. She said it was like it was happening to her, watching it. She said it was okay to experience the suffering of the slaves, because at least that was pure, but what made her throw up was feeling inside herself the cruelty of the masters.”
“That poor rabbi,” Vera said, starting to cry again.
I nodded, though I did not want to think about the rabbi, had built up ramparts in my mind against that kind of information long ago.
“I’m really hungry,” Vera said.
I took her wet, gritty hands in mine. “Then let’s get something to eat.”
—
We wound up in the Belgian restaurant that was the ground floor of our building, again. This time we both ordered the borscht. “I’m sorry I got so freaked out,” Vera said, tearing into one of the rolls in the basket and dipping it in the rich pink broth of her soup. She had gone into the bathroom of the restaurant when we first got there to clean the mud from her face, and her hair was still wet and slicked back from her forehead. It made her look vulnerable. “But then why should I be sorry — who can hear something like that and just stand there? You know, it’s sort of disgusting, all of us here on vacation.”
I nodded. It was swelteringly hot out, but it continued to rain. Our table was right by the window and I watched the drops coming down and hitting the steaming cobblestone street. “But it’s also about memory,” I said, thinking of Darius, of his peculiar unbending rigidity. “Remembering. There’s nothing gross about that — trying to hold on to the memories of your people. That’s important.”
“I have to tell you something,” Vera said.
My fatherly ears pricked. No one announced they were going to tell you something before telling you unless it was something big. Or something bad.
“One time,” Vera said, setting down her roll, leaning back in her chair, “Fang and I were lying in this field, and it was fall, before the episode, but it was really sunny, a really pretty, pretty day, and the grass was green, and we were lying there, just watching the clouds, and I was thinking that we would never be that young again. That every moment that passed, we were moving closer to death, and I felt like I could feel myself rotting. I kept thinking I could smell us rotting, just underneath the regular smells of sweat and skin and perfume or whatever. I remember thinking that it was my job to keep Fang from ever noticing that we were dying. I started doing this thing, of kissing him between his eyes, and in my mind, I thought I was keeping his third eye shut so that he wouldn’t see, so that he wouldn’t know that we were dying. And maybe you think that’s crazy, but at the same time it was true, you know, every day you live, you get closer to dying. That’s a fact.”
She eyed me uneasily, as though she were waiting to see if I would agree. “Death and taxes,” I said. “They’re inevitable.”
She nodded, seemingly reassured. “And then,” she went on, “when I had the episode. Part of it was that I thought, well, that there is so much more to life than what’s cool or uncool in a high school in Rancho Cucamonga. I was watching these cheerleaders getting drunk and I started to see the muscles under their skin, and their skulls, and all their veins, and I realized they were rotting too. They were dying and they had no idea. They were like corpses in party dresses, worried only about who had the cutest shoes. It was revolting. Revolting the same way it is revolting to watch everyone just listen, nodding, as Darius talks about murder, about that poor rabbi, about all of it — the mass graves, the torn-down buildings, people’s whole lives erased. How can the world go on? How can you just go out to lunch like we’re doing right now?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wanting so badly to steer her, to force her to think about it differently, less melodramatically, even though on some level I thought she was right. “What else is there to do, though?”
“Papa,” she said. “Do I sound insane to you? Are the thoughts I’m thinking really insane? That’s what I want to know.”
I sighed. I didn’t want to contribute to some kind of delusion that she wasn’t mentally ill. That was one of the recurrent themes in all the narratives of mental illness I had read in books, on message boards, in forums: The desire to believe that they weren’t actually crazy was one of the chief dangers for the mentally ill. The suspicion would build in them until eventually they stopped taking their medication and then they would have another episode and their lives would unravel further. But at the same time I worried I would lose Vera — that this tenuous intimacy would slip through my fingers. And I didn’t think what she was saying was truly crazy. Kat and I had said far, far crazier things to each other when we were her age. “No,” I said. “You don’t sound crazy to me.”
She nodded, leaned toward me over the table. “Okay,” she said, taking a deep breath. “Now I need to tell you the big thing. And you are going to be really, really mad at me, okay?”
I nodded, unsure what she was going to say and praying, just praying that she was not going to tell me she was pregnant. I don’t know why, it was the only thing that occurred to me: that she was pregnant with Fang’s baby and she was going to try to convince me she would be sane enough to mother it.
“The night of the episode,” she said, “that night at the party? Fang and I had taken acid. I was on acid that night.”
This new fact was like something injected into my bloodstream and for a time I was unable to say or even think anything as it traveled through me causing a series of chemical reactions, complex recalculations that I couldn’t compute fast enough. My mental state was really more like a strobe light than an opinion.
“I didn’t want to tell the cops I was on drugs!” Vera rushed on. “It was one of those decisions you make at the time that then you can’t take back, and also, well — it was complicated. Papa, are you listening?”
“I’m listening,” I said. I had never done acid myself — it had been one of those drugs that scared me a little. But it was starting to click together — Vera’s story, her own sureness that she wasn’t mentally ill, her scorn for the doctors and for all of us, her worry that the self was not a solid thing but instead a swarm of chemicals, a collection of the little men inside of her. Dear God. If she wasn’t mentally ill, had we been drugging her, poisoning her, all this time for no reason? It was terrible to think about, but also building in me was a wild, irrepressible hope that it was true — that she was not mentally ill, that it had just been a big mistake.
“So what you are saying is that you don’t think you have bipolar?” I asked.
“Well,” Vera said, “I don’t really know. I mean, Fang was on acid and he didn’t take off all his clothes and start telling the cheerleaders they were sinners. So I really did think I had an episode, and I just didn’t want to tell the drugs part, but then over the past few months me and Fang have been thinking, well, what if I’m sane? What if it was just the acid?”